Just the sax, man

Saxophonist Tim Ries is nothing if not versatile.

One of New York’s busiest freelance musicians, he also plays the flute and keyboards. He composes. He arranges the music of other composers.

He is equally at home in classical music, jazz, pop and rock, having recently completed his third world tour with the Rolling Stones.

On Friday, Ries returns to the classical side, performing Takashi Yoshimatsu’s saxophone concerto, “Cyber-bird,” with the Spokane Symphony.

Associate Conductor Morihiko Nakahara will lead the orchestra in a program that also includes Hector Berlioz’s famed “Symphonie Fantastique” and Osvaldo Golijov’s “The Night of the Flying Horses.”

Ries grew up in Detroit as a member of a highly musical family.

“My father played jazz trumpet, my mother and my grandmother played piano and my sisters sang,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in New York.

“When I really began showing interest in playing the saxophone, my father decided I had to ‘do things right’ and he started me on lessons with teachers who were faculty members from the University of Michigan.”

After high school, Ries’ interests focused on jazz. “I got my bachelor’s degree at the University of North Texas and my first gig was touring with Maynard Ferguson,” he said.

Ries later returned to the University of Michigan, where he resumed his saxophone studies and also majored in composition, studying with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer William Bolcom.

“I was trying to decide whether to move to New York or LA,” Ries says, “but New York had the attraction of the girl I was dating at the time, who later became my wife, who was studying harp at Juilliard.”

He and wife Stacy Shames, the harpist of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, still live in New York with their three daughters.

Ries was a founding member of the saxophone quartet PRISM, which specializes in contemporary music, and he has worked with long list of performers including Stevie Wonder, Sheryl Crow, Lyle Lovett, Phil Woods, Blood, Sweat & Tears and, most famously, the Stones.

He has released an album of his own jazz arrangements of Rolling Stones songs on the Concord label and is producing an album of the band’s songs using musical styles of the countries where the group performed.

When the Japan Society decided to sponsor a Carnegie Hall concert of contemporary classical music from that nation, Ries was asked to perform Yoshimatu’s “Cyber-bird” Concerto with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

“Of course, there are not many pieces for saxophone and symphony orchestra,” Ries says. “But even if there were, this would be one of the great ones; it great to play and very much audience-friendly.

“It has everything – some incredibly fast writing and some improvisation. And the slow movement is just incredibly beautiful and lyrical.”

Yoshimatsu wrote the concerto in 1993 on commission for the Japanese saxophonist Nobuya Sugawa. The title was inspired, the composer says, by the dying wish of his sister, who wanted to return to earth, in her next life, as a bird.

Nakahara has also programmed another recent work for Friday’s concert, “The Night of the Flying Horses,” which the South American composer Osvaldo Golijov based on his score for the film “The Man Who Cried.”

The concert will close with Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” a work inspired by the composer’s love for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.

In addition to Friday’s performance, Ries will present a free public master class today at 4 p.m. in Room 123 of the Music Building on Eastern Washington University’s Cheney campus.

He also will be featured on the symphony’s Classical Chat program today at 12:15 p.m. in the council chambers at Spokane City Hall, which airs live on city cable channel 5.

Nakahara will discuss the music on the program as part of the Gladys Brooks Pre-Concert Talk on Friday at 7 p.m. in the INB Performing Arts Center auditorium.